mod J & P Rebalance Mod by JonnyH13 and Pandakraut 05/06/2023 1.28.4

[pandakraut]

2 hours ago, nik_nv said:

Potomac fort for CSA, legendary difficulty.. Is that so legendary?

Those are some impressive surrender numbers. You're playing with the Surrender + Rebalance version right?

[nik_nv]

5 hours ago, pandakraut said:

Those are some impressive surrender numbers. You're playing with the Surrender + Rebalance version right?

Yes, correct, and I enjoy it. At least it looks more realistic, people don't want to die right.

 

[Minas Moth]

So here is my experience on completing the Shiloh as Union on Major General difficulty on the First Day.

1. ARMY SETUP:

• Career Points: Army Organization should be at least 6 (with other points distributed as you please but either Training, Medicine or Economy seem to be the ones that should be focused on although Logistics could be very good for such a battle as it takes a lot of ammo). I have managed to win the battle with 26 Brigades in 2 Corps (25 Brigades in I st Corps and 1 Brigade in II nd Corps).
• Weapons: this early in campaign it could be difficult to acquire number of guns needed to field army large enough to bring as much units as possible. However don't be reluctant to use career points to acquire more quality weapons. I fielded 2 Brigades with Lorenz Rifles, 1 Brigade with Springfield 1861, 5 Brigades with SF1855s, and the rest used whatever was left to use. 
• Units and Positioning: To win the battle as painless as possible keep care off and develop units you got after Philippi... Optimally, you should have 2 2 star infantry Brigades, and 1 2 star Artillery Unit... My First Corps Setup was like this: 1st Division=3 Infantry Brigades, 2 Artillery Brigades, 2nd Division= 3 infantry Brigades, Cavalry Brigade (300 men strong) and 1 Battery (which didn't come in to the Shiloh Phase).
  • Artillery: Now, that Artillery unit is of paramount importance. I equipped mine with 12 pdr Napoleons because I brought it up to 12 guns but I chose Long Range and Extreme Range Perks for that unit (as I had in mind future guns I'll equip to that unit). Also, the second Artillery unit was equipped with 24pdr Howitzers (8 of them) and also chose Long Range Perk for it. Those two Artillery units are absolutely crucial to bring in to defense of the Shiloh Church. Napoleons work best if positioned just south-west of the Shiloh Church in a way that left of the unit rests just below the corner of the Church. The 24pdrs How. should be positioned on the east part on the road that goes north of the tree line above the stream where the camp is...If you get it right, both of your batteries will have optimal range to use shell when enemy gets out of woods to cross the stream, and once they start crossing they will get in the canister range while crossing the stream. Also such positioning will give you ability to Enfilade enemies with either Napoleons or Howitzers depending where the enemy puts the pressure on you. Other than that, I also had a battery of 4 14 pdr James Rifles that came in during Hornets nest Phase, 3 Reserve Batteries of 6 pdrs and 1 Reserve Battery of Napoleons.
  • Infantry: Remember that 2 star Infantry units we were talking about earlier? How to put them to good use' Firstly, equip them with Lorenz Rifles you get for career points. Secondly, one of the units should hold the line (you can put it anywhere you think the pressure will be big). However the other 2 star units (In my case it was the 5th US Inf.) should get in the tree line on the western part just west of the farm. Do not put unit into that farm. Rest of Infantry should be positioned in a way their optimal range starts when Rebels get out of woods and start crossing the stream.
  • Cavalry: For me... that single 300 men strong cavalry brigade is what won me the entire battle on the first day. You can equip them with palmetto 1842 and a sword, they will do just fine. 
• Commanders: Your General should be in command of the 1st Corps... Divisions should be commanded by Lt. Colonels and your Brigades by Colonels whenever possible. Batteries can be commanded by Majors, Captains etc.

PHASE 1 - THE SHILOH CHURCH:

This is the phase that will either make or break your battle of Shiloh...If you chose correct army setup and positioned your units with good arcs of fire as explained above then you should be good. When the AI starts charging always use fall back option in order to break up their charge... Also, focus your guns on the enemy units that have gone the furthest in the woods. They have cover bonus there and are occupying place you want to get back to when they are driven off. When such units are routed always shift focus on AIs 3 star and 2 star brigades with your guns. Work them over as much as you can... To break them for the first time is very hard but if they break once every other time it will be easier. I managed to completely shatter 3 star 980 strong unit. So in the center the game is: Focus artillery fire, retreat and advance your infantry Brigades to occupy favorable positions.

Now, when the battle starts, AI will send some Mounted Infantry (Avery's Cavalry) on your western flank. The one where one of your 2 star Infantry Brigades is sitting in the tree line... Couple of volleys will take care of them. Once dealt with advance your 2 star unit south-east so it can get into the flank of the Rebels that charge over the stream and into the woods below the Shiloh church. Even if AI sends some units further west to try to push for the farm they can be easily routed by cross fire from Shiloh Church woods and your right flank. As soon as you rout the Avery's Cavalry move your Cavalry Brigade across the stream and send it deep south. Once all of the enemies Brigades spawn in (I think Polk's Corps is the last one) it is time to rob the Rebels of all of their supplies. It is paramount to capture both of the supply wagons while they are still all the way down south (aka before they move up and are protected by infantry and guns). When you get them, send them on a wide western flanking march all the way to your lines. This move seals the battle of the Shiloh and secures you victory on the first day. This supplies will keep your guns and Brigades firing while disabling Rebels ability to fight effectively.

At one point, My second Corps came in...though only thing I could afford was 1000 men strong skirmisher unit equipped with Percussion Muskets (so not a lot of force that came in). But bit by bit enemy got withered down, and I just pushed east with my single brigade that poured flanking fire into attacking Rebels at the beginning. In the end, that single Brigade rolled up almost entire flank of the rebel army.

PHASE II - SPAIN AND LARKIN FIELDS:

Depending on how many Brigades you have (above or below 30) you can choose to fight here for a while or let the AI take the Spain Field and move to the next phase...

 

Edited March 22, 2019 by Minas Moth

[Minas Moth]

PHASE III - HORNETS NEST

When this phase opens up pull back your troops that defended the Spain and Larkin Fields toward the Hornets Nest. Your line should move in the tree line from east to west like this: on the far east you should put 2 or three smaller (around 150 men equipped with low quality guns) skirmisher to harass the enemies flank. Make your line in the woods from river in a more or less straight line west to the Hornets Nest. Now from  Hornets Nest make your line run south east so it links up with your Shiloh Church Defenders. By now, Rebels attacking Shiloh Church should be out of steam and all of your defenders should start rolling up Rebels left flank. Optimally you want to do that as fast as possible as you want to start pouring the fire into the Rebels amassing for the attack on the Hornets Nest. Once you clear them off from Spain field and position your Napoleons and 24pdr Howitzers in the woods just North of the Spain field the battle is over. In effect you will always cross AI's T and poor fire into his flank. From then on it is just one giant mop up.

When Bruce's and Ammen's Brigade come in you will be able to push even from Hornets Nest South. Advance your guns with your infantry to constantly whip the enemy.

And that is basically it... The Battle of Shiloh is decided in the First Phase... and if you do that right, everything else is like a park walk

[Defacto]

I've gone back to playing with just the UI&AI mod. Unfortunately, I find that there are some problems with this mod as it is currently, even though I really like a lot of the ideas and I certainly enjoyed the Union MG campaign I played (up to Cold Harbor).

I really like what's been done to make perks matter more, but I think that it has been taken too far. Especially with the AI units always having random perks, which is suboptimal. For infantry you always want to go 100% Firepower or 100% Melee in perks. At three stars and with correct (good guns for firepower bdes and guns with 80 or more melee for charge bdes) equipment you can get 1200-man brigades that reload almost instantly while evaporating 200 enemies with every salvo, ending up at over 10000 kills in grand battles if positioned correctly (and if the enemy has that amount of troops available). Charge-oriented brigades I have not found as much use for. The Iron Brigade (gifted after Antietam) is completely useless in firepower and gets outgunned by one-star brigades with the 100% Accuracy perk. However, when charging, they catch up to galloping cavalry and insta-deletes anything they touch. They can charge three larger brigades and rout all of them. Because they are faster than other brigades, they can actually stay in melee when a unit flees, which often results in hundreds of melee kills or a surrendered unit.

The AI seems completely unable to deal with any of this. Pretty much all battles look the same: First I get completely steamrolled by an enormous human wave of 5000-man brigades that stumble over themselves and basically cover the entire map. Then I slowly wear them down with my minmaxed 'space marine' units like the Iron Brigade, or '10000 kills' three-star firepower brigade, or my sharpshooters that routs any brigade with two flank salvos... then I completely wipe the enemy army. Every major battle since Shiloh has looked like this. It doesn't feel like the American Civil war, it feels like one of those total war mods where players run in circles around an absurdly buffed AI that doesn't know how to play the game.

I hope all of this doesn't sound too harsh, I really like a lot of the work you people have done, and I understand that modding this game is not trivial (ironic considering the origin of the developer). I think that the type of mod experience I am looking for is something that combines the fixes in the UI&AI mod with increased authenthicity and realism, while making sure that the AI understand how to play and can pose a challenge without enormous AI buffs. I might have to start doing some hex-editing myself..

 

[pandakraut]

8 hours ago, nik_nv said:

Yes, correct, and I enjoy it. At least it looks more realistic, people don't want to die right.

 

Great, glad you found a combination that feels better. For myself, I think it goes a bit to far, but we'll be using some similar ideas in 1.3 to try and push a bit more in that direction.

Edited March 22, 2019 by pandakraut

[nik_nv]

Played the 1st bull run again for CSA on legendary. Well, it was a little more hard, more casualties, but it's ONLY because of poor weapon. Old musketes with 250 effective range against Enfield 1853 with 400 range..

What to suggest:

1. Dig for that AI scripts, it's really stupid for now, I can predict what will be the AI' next step with 100% precision. It's simply tries to charge me if it seems I'm outnumbered. Actually this can work as a trap for AI, I usually put behind my "weak" unit some strong melee cavalry, and they charge back the attackers and.. attackers surrenders! Then this story happens again and again.. 

2. Artillery does not surrender! This is actually the problem, if they are too many like 1000 ohh it takes much time to kill them all, tired of that..

3. Morale drop in case of flanking damage is too much. It's not good for both sides. My units suffer excessively much from some far cannon and enemy's units suffer some unfair damage when charging. I suggest to consider the distance at first..

4. Long range cavalry is too strong even in melee fight. How many times I used them to capture some wavering units.. I think that cavalry rifles should have the melee damage no more than 50 even for the best ones.. 

5. I don't know how to make it, but in artillery duels damage/destroying the guns is more important than loosing men. So let's consider the situation when an artillery unit has lost all its guns.. I suggest to transform it to skirmisher with a poor weapon.  

 

Edited March 22, 2019 by nik_nv

[pandakraut]

34 minutes ago, nik_nv said:

1. Dig for that AI scripts, it's really stupid for now, I can predict what will be the AI' next step with 100% precision. It's simply tries to charge me if it seems I'm outnumbered. Actually this can work as a trap for AI, I usually put behind my "weak" unit some strong melee cavalry, and they charge back the attackers and.. attackers surrenders! Then this story happens again and again.. 

2. Artillery does not surrender! This is actually the problem, if they are too many like 1000 ohh it takes much time to kill them all, tired of that..

3. Morale drop in case of flanking damage is too much. It's not good for both sides. My units suffer excessively much from some far cannon and enemy's units suffer some unfair damage when charging. I suggest to consider the distance at first..

4. Long range cavalry is too strong even in melee fight. How many times I used them to capture some wavering units.. I think that cavalry rifles should have the melee damage no more than 50 even for the best ones.. 

5. I don't know how to make it, but in artillery duels damage/destroying the guns is more important than loosing men. So let's consider the situation when an artillery unit has lost all its guns.. I suggest to transform it to skirmisher with a poor weapon.  

Keep in mind the combined mod is not entirely up to date or balanced. The surrender changes + the increased melee effectiveness are probably to strong in situations like you described.

Artillery surrendering was added in a later version of the Rebalance mod so it is not available in the combined mod.

We're currently in the process of reworking weapon and morale damage.

Having artillery convert to skirmishers when their guns are destroyed is not something that is possible to support for various technical reasons.

[zurn0]

Just wanted to say, I really appreciate the work being done on these balance mods, it's made the battles feel a lot more "realistic", especially with the units getting tired more easily and suffering more for it. Thanks!

[pandakraut]

14 minutes ago, zurn0 said:

Just wanted to say, I really appreciate the work being done on these balance mods, it's made the battles feel a lot more "realistic", especially with the units getting tired more easily and suffering more for it. Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback. Glad you're enjoying the mod.

[civsully1]

Just checking...is the 1.24 the most current version?  And just catching up on your video series and at Malvern Hill vid. While in your camp screen on this older vid as your discussing Arty I see a lot more detail in the description of different pieces. Like Accuracy Low & High and rating of different shell types; cannister, solid, etc.  I'm wondering how that is? Thx in advance. And really appreciate how quickly you reply to questions/comments posted on Youtube.

[pandakraut]

43 minutes ago, civsully1 said:

Just checking...is the 1.24 the most current version?

Yes, that's the most recent version. We're working on 1.3 but not eta at this time.

44 minutes ago, civsully1 said:

While in your camp screen on this older vid as your discussing Arty I see a lot more detail in the description of different pieces. Like Accuracy Low & High and rating of different shell types; cannister, solid, etc.

The older videos are using version 1.5 of the UI mod which has the same tooltips as Rebalance mod v1.23. The newer tooltips are actually more detailed than the old ones the data is just displayed differently. Accuracy goes away because I multiplied it by the base damage to show the damage range the weapon has. The shell type ratings were really vague and subjective so I replaced them with the actual percentages at different ranges for each weapon.

Happy to hear the videos are useful. Just let me know if you have any questions.

[civsully1]

Thanks PK! 😀

[nik_nv]

Please find a way to open the whole map at once.. I'm so tired from that micro-maps 😒

Edited March 23, 2019 by nik_nv

[ErikS1998]

Is there a reason why these modifiers show up?

[pandakraut]

1 hour ago, ErikS1998 said:

Is there a reason why these modifiers show up?

That's a bug from the base game that gets reported every now and again. Unfortunately once it happens your save file is basically broken. Going back to a prior save and replaying the last battle before the bug occurred is probably the only solution.

I've also seen it suggested that the game needs to be reinstalled to fix this issue, but I don't know for sure if that's the case. If you find a way to resolve the issue, please let me know.

 

 

[civsully1]

On 5/11/2018 at 5:26 PM, Zenneh said:

 

On the par, No I'm the one outnumbering the CSA by a massive margin but this is on BG

I'm naughty in the fact that I cleanse the entire field of enemies though instead of finishing so the max they can field is 50K so my first corp actually out numbers them heavily.

Then i have 240 Napoleons, 70 20 PDRS, 60 30 Siege and 30 Whits - this is the reason you play Union I guess - most of them are sent running before they even get a chance to fire back xD

 

Regarding Salem:- I think the only way is to do it like supply run - take the point then lure them all away from it or do it last second a cheesy tactic though 

 

On a balance side of things I admit every battle after Shiloh was pretty trivial but on the other hand everything before and including Shiloh was quite the nasty nightmare.

When I tried the MG run of Phillipi the battle timer was a lie - It ended with 2 hours to go - which left me rather red faced failing the first mission X_X

 

For both sides I've played on BG and both times after Shiloh my army simply begins to out number the opposing forces - this usually happened in vanilla but since I actually now can take a far larger majority in it benefits me far more.

 

Side note: After playing some MG i can see why you don't make your brigades so large. started with a 4000 1star and 1800 2star and went against 6 x 1700's won it but wanted to see how bad I had scaled it so I restarted and split the 4000 into 2 2000's and became vs 6 x 1300's. so 2400 less infantry.

Probably best to have Recon 2 so you can play the scaling game in MG I guess :x

I know this is early in the mod thread so apologize if the question is answered later. How does investing in Recon provide benefits with the mod changes? How much is considered ideal? With my first play using the mod (just completed Malvern Hill) I have just one point in it as I'm filling out; org, med, econ, training, & politics over recon. Thx!

[pandakraut]

27 minutes ago, civsully1 said:

I know this is early in the mod thread so apologize if the question is answered later. How does investing in Recon provide benefits with the mod changes? How much is considered ideal? With my first play using the mod (just completed Malvern Hill) I have just one point in it as I'm filling out; org, med, econ, training, & politics over recon. Thx!

In the mod Recon adds 50 spotting per point to your units in addition to the normal bonuses. So you can use them to make it easier to spot enemy skirmishers and artillery. The last campaign I went through with 4 points, but I've also seen players push it all the way up to 8-10 after getting the other stats to around 5 or so. 

With the mod changes to the career points I don't think an optimal setup has really been found yet. What you want really depends on how you play and how you build your army.

[pandakraut]

On 3/22/2019 at 4:58 AM, Defacto said:

I've gone back to playing with just the UI&AI mod. Unfortunately, I find that there are some problems with this mod as it is currently, even though I really like a lot of the ideas and I certainly enjoyed the Union MG campaign I played (up to Cold Harbor).

I really like what's been done to make perks matter more, but I think that it has been taken too far. Especially with the AI units always having random perks, which is suboptimal. For infantry you always want to go 100% Firepower or 100% Melee in perks. At three stars and with correct (good guns for firepower bdes and guns with 80 or more melee for charge bdes) equipment you can get 1200-man brigades that reload almost instantly while evaporating 200 enemies with every salvo, ending up at over 10000 kills in grand battles if positioned correctly (and if the enemy has that amount of troops available). Charge-oriented brigades I have not found as much use for. The Iron Brigade (gifted after Antietam) is completely useless in firepower and gets outgunned by one-star brigades with the 100% Accuracy perk. However, when charging, they catch up to galloping cavalry and insta-deletes anything they touch. They can charge three larger brigades and rout all of them. Because they are faster than other brigades, they can actually stay in melee when a unit flees, which often results in hundreds of melee kills or a surrendered unit.

The AI seems completely unable to deal with any of this. Pretty much all battles look the same: First I get completely steamrolled by an enormous human wave of 5000-man brigades that stumble over themselves and basically cover the entire map. Then I slowly wear them down with my minmaxed 'space marine' units like the Iron Brigade, or '10000 kills' three-star firepower brigade, or my sharpshooters that routs any brigade with two flank salvos... then I completely wipe the enemy army. Every major battle since Shiloh has looked like this. It doesn't feel like the American Civil war, it feels like one of those total war mods where players run in circles around an absurdly buffed AI that doesn't know how to play the game.

I hope all of this doesn't sound too harsh, I really like a lot of the work you people have done, and I understand that modding this game is not trivial (ironic considering the origin of the developer). I think that the type of mod experience I am looking for is something that combines the fixes in the UI&AI mod with increased authenthicity and realism, while making sure that the AI understand how to play and can pose a challenge without enormous AI buffs. I might have to start doing some hex-editing myself..

 

Thanks for the feedback. Several of those criticisms are the same or similar to my own of the mod's current state. We've definitely sacrificed historical accuracy in a few places for more challenging game play. I think the weapon changes went the right direction, but minmaxing the perks definitely causes some problems since you can stack the same attribute multiple times.

We're currently working on taking some of the power out of perks and attaching it to firearms and other stats so that there are less extreme differences in performance between 3* units with different perks. The perks should specialize the unit in a role, not be required to make them functional and then stack multiple times to make them ridiculously better than a unit without.

I will say, that for my own play style I do like to have a mixture of perks. I usually take accuracy at rank one for acceptable performance shooting and then take melee and speed for rank two. This gives me a bit more of a buffer from the charging AI units as I find that double accuracy units are just to slow and get overrun to easily. I play with very small units and let my snipers and artillery do most of the killing so utility is more important to me than firepower for the infantry. While the numbers definitely need some work, I still think we're headed in the right direction compared to the base game where there is barely a choice to make. Hopefully we can get closer with the next version.

I think balancing out the perks as above will reduce the issue with random perks causing difficulty swings. For some context, I like the variety that random perks provide as you don't know more or less exactly what you are facing every time. Jonny would prefer most units have optimized perk patterns to make the units as effective as possible so this is a topic we are continuing to look at. We're completely redoing the perks at the moment as well, so will have to see how that settles out first though.

Past a certain point there is only so much we can do with the AI. It definitely seems to handle certain situations better with more men and extra brigades, but an experienced player tends to be able to run circles around them no matter what you do. We have a few small tweaks in the works around trying to get the AI to use it's artillery more effectively, but that is more patching over the exploit of the AI always targeting the closest unit. The larger part of the AI logic is more or less impenetrable to me unfortunately. Large chunks of it are moddable, but figuring out what to change to result in a positive outcome has been difficult.

There are changes that we could make to make the game significantly more challenging, but in most cases that would boil down to the AI has more and stronger units, so it should just mass charge you off the field if it really wanted to win. From what I understand the game used to work this way back in beta and it pretty severely limited how you had to play.

[civsully1]

Just spent the better part of my Sunday going through this thread. Absolutely amazing work and commentary to be sure.  This mod has breathed new life back into UGCW for me. If I could request one thing it would be a guide on weaponry similar to the one The Soldier did for Arty which still stands out to me as a "Gold Standard".  I'm "Spreadsheet Deficient"!!! 🙄

 

I need to do a better job thinking about my process for building new units in terms of Perks matching weapons and unit types. This came to mind as I've been watching Fiasco_Games great and current play-through as CSA. His last short video just on his current Camp Screen is something I haven't seen much of in the past and it's worth the view and the time to watch his series if you are playing this mod. It's apparent to me that from the start I wasn't planning correctly in giving a new unit the right Perk from the start.  Learn as you go seems to be my motto as I've begun playing this mod and UGCW again! 

46 PAGES!! Thx to all that are making this so interesting!  And PK, really do appreciate the time you take here and in your video series and Fiasco_Games in answering my questions. Much appreciated.

[civsully1]

OK PK, Question for you. Can you discuss Economy in terms of the shop multipliers when you can?  Ammo I got it.  Do the multipliers increase the number of weapons available in the shop after each battle and or increase the chance of better weapons? Thx!

[pandakraut]

21 minutes ago, civsully1 said:

OK PK, Question for you. Can you discuss Economy in terms of the shop multipliers when you can?  Ammo I got it.  Do the multipliers increase the number of weapons available in the shop after each battle and or increase the chance of better weapons? Thx!

Economy has no effect on the numbers of weapons available in the store. You need points in logistics for that. Every point in logistics will increase the stock of weapons by 25% after a major battle. Base amount of weapons is now 50% less with 0 points in Logistics. Logistics stock modifier is only half as effective for artillery. 

The bonuses from economy reduce the buy price of weapons in the shop and increase the sell price of weapons in the player's armory.

[civsully1]

Dumb I meant Logistics!! Thx!

 

Edited March 24, 2019 by civsully1

[zyszczak]

Hi, I was playing a lot with mod lately and want to give you guys some feedback. I mainly played csa campaign with only touching union side.

I have started with BG diffculty but quickly moved to MG because it was to easy. On MG unfortunetly situation did not change that much. Sure AI have much more troops and they are better equiped and more expierienced but AI still acts like complete moron. To elaborate - it just do not know how to coordinate attacks similary to vanilla and is charging with few brigades instead of whole line when it could destroy my line and secure favorable position. Good example is first Bull Run when you could camp your brigades with few cannons in forrest behind Mathew's Hill and win battle without even using Jackson Brigades. Only exception was Shiloh which is on the MG test of your understanding of mod mechanics. For example artillery is more like bettering ram and should be close as possible to break enemy lines. Breaking enemy charges with falling back, so they tire and then charging back (this strat will not work if AI would know how to coordinate it's charges). Using those strats I could wipe out whole enemy army. And this was only challenge on MG i think. After 1st Bull Run I was always killing whole enemy army with ease and after Fredricksburg i lost intrest in playing more.

So i switched to Legendary difficulty. To shiloh it was quite easy is most cases i still was able to wipe most of enemy forces but with sligtly bigger casualties on my side. Then I got big problem with shiloh. My troops are doing fine on the left. Whole union army is encirlced and very slowly i kill those 3-4k brigades (This is painfull they should just surrender). But with Right and Center I am in a lot of trouble. A lot of 4 - 5.5k brigades mostly with 2 and 3 stars which duplicates like crazy. Plus those pesky skirimshers with 3 stars which are very hard to kill are constatnly decimating my brigdes forcing them to rout. And my allied brigades just suck compared to union army. Armed with only muskets one star brigades and crap artillery armed with 3in and napoleons without even one star with 5 effieciency cuz captains are in charge of 450 artillery brigades. Also in this mission to win you have to lose less then 75% of your armies but duplicated brigades start with around 1k losses at the start (bug)  In my case it is around 3k men.

I tried few diffrent tactics but with little success. Luring enemies and encircling them = fail. Thay are to big to kill and they always outrun you so you inflict about 500k casulties while taking some. And in the end there is big possibilty for them to rout behind your lines and make you fight on two fronts which is suecide when enemy outnumers you so badly. Also you commit 3 brigades to charge to be effective and they will need to rest. Outshouting them is impossible without accuracy perks and with muskets.

Slowly pushing is also bad idea because of supreme enemy artillery and troops. Moving fast is good until hornet's nest becouse in first part you have more troops in left corner but after battelfield expands you can be quickly ovverun by those 4-5k 2-3 star brigades. And loosing yout artillery.

After few tries and better rng where 3 of my artillery brigades splited. I was able to push enemy up to Pitsburg's landing but when Grant got his reinforcmets I was not able to break him and bleeded my army to much. After that i turned AI variance mode in settings and after few tries I was able to achive victory. But I feel like i cheated with save scumming in middle of battle and lowering difficulty by changing settings. Also the biggest problem with that victory was that I still wiped out all enemy forces. So I am still trying to beat it without changing config file. 

So in conclusion unfortunetly for me outcomes where almost binary. You either lose all kill whole enemy army. And I really do not like this conclusion. I like when historical games have realistic aproach. 

In last section I would like to summarise pros and cons of this mod and do not mentioned above:

Starting with pros:

• Great career changes, makes more playstiles available;
• Fatigue system - vanilla is just stupid;
• Changes to UI (but not short weapon names, but i know it is not your fault);
• Much better melee in general;
• New perk system of specialising units (but it needs some tweaking, currently perks have to big influence on unit effectiveness);
• Artillery is much better in this mode. But i think that canister fire is to strong at the moment;
• AI does not charge from 1-2 mile away at you.
• Overall better expierience;
• Oficer replacment mechanic;
• Ecpnomy changes.

And cons:

• Perks play too big role and weapon damage is too low creating funny situation. 1400k man 0 - star brigade kills less then 10 people in open field. 1 star kills around 15-35. 2 stars gets 50-70 kills and 3 star get over 100-200.  (Observation through out the game not tested. More experienced brigades usually had better weapons.) So in my opinion 0 and 1 star brigades performe badly and 3 stars are too good.
• AI is dumb like in vanilla except from charging decisons. It would be great if you guys were able to fix it .This is simulation of AI's thought process: 
  • Use cover - Hell no. Cover is for weak and I dont need weak men in my army anyways.
  • How about flanking general, we have more troops then the enemy. - Flanking is stupid and gay.
  • So what is the best tactic? - We are just gonna attack in short line and the rest of our 40k army will stand in big spaghetti formation just behind our fighting troops. (But not always sometimes it actually can get into a nice line with multiple attacks, mainly at start of the battle but after breaking AI lines it have big problems with reforming it).
• Skirmishers still sometimes where able to beat specialized shock cavallry in melee. I think forest, grass, building penalty is to strong or it should aplly to other units also. Maybe perk that will decreese it. This maybe also be problem with hitboxes. When i am charging and skirmishers that are outside of forrest sometimes it feels like penalty on my cav is applied. And cav is only good counter to skirmishers propably.
• 3 star brigades with speed perks are to fast. They could get +125% speed bonus with right general and it looks ridiculous.
• I do not understand and dislike officers rank changes. And they get expierience too slow. It is sad that Jackson or Longstreet cannot become even a major general for very long time.

Otherwise it is best mod to this game and I really appreciate that you have decided to mod even with very limited modding tools. I hope that you will continue good work and some of my concerns will disapear after release of 1.3 version. I would like to buy you guys a beer so if you accept any donations send me PM.

Best of luck

I edited some misspellings, I am not native english speaker. If you see some other mistakes let me know.

Edited March 25, 2019 by zyszczak

[nik_nv]

48 minutes ago, zyszczak said:

AI is dumb like in vanilla except from charging decisons. It would be great if you guys were able to fix it .

The bright example of how AI is working in this game is Antietam. If you play for CSA It was scripted for that battle for AI to attack just 2 areas (the church and the sunken road), so the whole enemy army is trying go there regardless of how strong is your position and what's happening on flanks. So if you have managed to stop their push at the corn field they will stand there until you encircle them and destroy/capture all. It's possible to win (with total wiping out the enemy!) even if you have just 30k army against 80k (the most I tested), just stop them at the corn field and then the enemy numerous advantage will not matter anymore..

 

58 minutes ago, zyszczak said:

3 star brigades with speed perks are to fast.

Not only, the skirmishers now are more fast than cavalry! pandakraut please fix it 😓